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February 24, 2004
Grey at the Temples
As an act of civil disobedience, spygeek.com is participating in
Grey Tuesday. I am protesting EMI's attempts to censor the Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse. It's time we stopped corporations from preventing creativity and artistic expression in the form of sampling and other derivative works.
As part of my support of Grey Tuesday, I'm making the Grey Album available for download for 24 hours, and I turned my site grey for a day.
Update 2/24 10:17PM CST:
I am taking the songs down before I go to bed. I made it about 23 hours and 15 minutes. I even got a cease and desist for my troubles!
I hope everyone who downloaded from me will remember Grey Tuesday as a positive experience.
Posted by Laura at 10:19 PM | Comments (2)
February 22, 2004
Corn Kernels
I actually managed to compile a 2.6.3 kernel for my Linux box.
laura@sophia:~$ uname -a
Linux sophia 2.6.3.20040222 #1 Sun Feb 22 02:34:03 CST 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
Yippee!
It only took..um...4 tries. Not understanding all of the configuration options can be a real bear. Here's what I learned:
1. Don't enable framebuffer support unless you really, truly need to. I enabled it, not understanding what it was, and my monitor would turn off just as the kernel started to boot. Made it a little hard to figure out the problem. I even tried to log in with the monitor off so I could ssh in from my XP box. That didn't work so I assume that it didn't boot to a prompt. Fortunately I had a boot disk from a previous attempt.
2. Damn POS video card. Never buy a crappy SiS PCI video card. Yea, it was 20 bucks but it took me a long time to figure out how to get it set up.
3. Intel Etherfast Pro 100, and other Intel network cards, hide out under Ethernet (10 or 100Mbit) ---> EISA, VLB, PCI and on board controllers. I went with the e100, but there's also eepro100.
Well I hope that helps someone...here's hoping the machine doesn't start smoking!
Posted by Laura at 03:14 PM
February 21, 2004
Indistinguishable
I downloaded some mp3s last night. I was being lazy (well, drunk) and saved the Incubus and Dido tracks into the same directory. When I launched Nero this morning to burn the Dido disc for BLuR, I found myself on the horns of a dilemma.
I couldn't figure out which tracks were which.
I ended up having to go to amazon to check the track list.
It's funny because, well, I think there should be an obvious difference between Dido and Incubus.
Posted by Laura at 01:12 PM
February 08, 2004
Wall of Shame
I've been going through my CDs and selling off my obscure TMBG collection so I can buy an iPod. So, that makes me wonder:
Whatever happened to The Wall music stores? They were purveyors of CDs with the "Lifetime Music Guarantee". They would slap a sticker on the CD when you bought it and you were supposed to put the sticker on the jewel case. If the CD ever went bad (i.e. you scratched it or something) you could take it into the store and as long as it had the sticker on it, you could swap it out for a new copy of the same disc. I remember saving the sticker once and using it on another CD, and I also remember disassembling cases to get the sticker onto a different CD. I'm sure that type of thing helped put them under...but I still have discs with the stickers on them! I guess the definition of "lifetime" in this case is "until the stores go under."
Posted by Laura at 11:10 PM | Comments (1)